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Army faces era of 'dynamic uncertainty' due to CR, sequestration

Army Chief of Staff Gen. Ray Odierno says the ups and downs caused by
sequestration, a series of continuing resolutions and the partial government
shutdown, have led to an era of "dynamic uncertainty" for the Army.

"The problem I see with sequestration is this continuing impact it's having on our
civilian employees," Odierno told Federal News Radio's DoD Reporter Jared Serbu
Tuesday at the 2013 AUSA Conference.

After enduring six to 12 furlough days during fiscal year 2013, DoD civilian
employees faced another round of furloughs at the start of this month because of
the partial government shutdown.

The continuing resolution Congress passed and the President signed to end the
shutdown contains the possibility of even more uncertainty come January, when
another batch of furloughs may occur if a new budget deal is not reached.

In Odierno's two years as the Army Chief of Staff, he's seen 13 continuing
resolutions come and go, which, over the long term, has created a predictability
problem for the military.

"The bottom line is you submit a budget, you work very hard with Congress to build
a budget for the Army, which we think is the best budget, the best use of the
dollars we have available," he said. "When it doesn't get passed and you go to a
continuing resolution, it doesn't match up with your priorities. And then what
happens is you get wasteful, because you can't necessarily let new contracts under
a continuing resolution. You can't do things that might help you to start moving
forward even with reduced budget levels."

Sgt. Maj. Raymond Chandler, the Sergeant Major of the Army, agreed with Odierno
about the detrimental impact of that uncertainty on the uniformed forces.

"If we've got predictability, we can make sure that our soldiers are resourced and
have their needs fulfilled for readiness and training, which is really the most
important thing we've got to do as an Army is to be trained and ready," Chandler
told Serbu at the AUSA Conference Tuesday. "Right now, because of sequestration,
we just really don't know how much we're going to have, where we need to apply
those resources and how we're going to make our Army better."

The problem with sequestration is not the amount of the cuts to the Army's budget
but how those cuts are implemented.

"It's all up front," Odierno said. "And when you want to take so much money out up
front, you're limited in what you can do. So, we have to really hit readiness and
modernization of our Army in order to meet the requirements of sequestration. If
we could backload it a bit, it would help us to better plan for it and come up
with a better solution at the same budget level."

During a press conference Monday, Odierno said that only two Army brigades are
fully trained and ready to deploy.

"We're focusing on individual and small-unit training in those units that are not
fully resourced, like the two brigades that the chief spoke about yesterday,"
Chandler said. "The challenge with that is you're not able to continue to develop
that training to larger, more larger-unit collective training tasks across the
Army. So, you only stay at a very low level of training."

For example, at the start of a training cycle, a soldier takes part in
physical fitness, individual weapons qualification and training on individuals
tasks.

"There are a lot of individual tasks, but eventually, you want to bring those
together for six to eight to 10 people to train together as a collective unit, a
squad,"
Chandler said. "We're at that baseline now for most of the Army and our ability to
grow that from a squad to a platoon to a company is really not possible at this
moment because of the effects of sequestration."

On Monday, Odierno described a "get well" plan for the service as it enters fiscal
2014, which assumes another continuing resolution and another round of
sequestration cuts.

"With worse case, we're going to have to go to some level of fencing a part of the
force that we're going to train full-up," Odierno said. "We're fencing around
seven brigades plus all the associated enablers and support capability that goes
with the brigades and we're going to try to get them trained. We hope to have that
done by June 2014."

In order to do that, the rest of the force will have to be trained at lower
levels.